Networth October 2007

I just finished updating our NetworthIQ profile, and although our net worth has increased, it’s been a bit hampered by the stock market. The last time I updated our numbers was August, and we’re up about $2000 since then. But our retirement accounts are actually worth less than they were in August, even though we’ve been contributing to them. The main reason our net worth is up is because our HSA balance has increased to nearly $3000, and we’ve paid off a little chunk on both of our mortgages.

The debt side of our balance sheet has $762 for my husband’s dermatology bill, on which we’re just paying $100 per month. The original bill was $1800, about 4 times what we had been quoted. We argued our point and they reduced it to $1262, which still sucked, but it was better than $1800. We have the money in our HSA to pay the whole thing, but since the office was so nasty to us when we were disputing the charges, we feel just fine about taking a year to pay it off.

We also have a debt for a computer the we bought for our insurance agency a few months ago, but since that is a business debt, I don’t list it with our personal assets/debts. Since we’re incorporated, our business is an entity on its own, with finances separate from ours. When we bought the computer, the corporation could have paid cash for it, but the store offered 12 months interest-free financing. Computers are considered office equipment, so you have to spread the expense deduction over a few years (three or five, I can’t remember off the top of my head). So this year, we’ll only be able to deduct a few hundred dollars of the total ($1600), and then a few hundred more next year, and so on. Since we wouldn’t be able to deduct the whole purchase price in 2007 anyway, it made sense to take advantage of the interest free loan for a year. Each month, we write a business check for $150 to pay for the computer, and we’ll finish paying for it in late spring/early summer 2008.

Nothing very exciting with our net worth this month. It would be nice if the stock market were doing a little better, but that’s mostly our retirement funds, which have another 30+ years to grow. We do have our HSA in the stock market, but it’s in a pretty conservative fund, so I’m not really worried about it. We’re going to be breaking into it in 2008, but after that, hopefully we’ll just leave it alone for a good long time and let it grow.